Transportation Security Administration agent Bill Kopf inspects a passenger's luggage at Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport on Tuesday morning. The TSA has been responsible for the airport's security for 10 years.

Particular segments of the flying public may find Amarillo airport security screenings easier in the future, though a federal expedited pre-check program won’t arrive any time soon, a federal official said Tuesday.

The Transportation Security Administration is moving toward a “common-sense” screening approach based on a passenger’s potential risk to others, which already has resulted in reduced checks for seniors and children boarding airplanes at Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport, TSA Federal Security Director John C. Sides said.

Airline passengers ages 75 and older haven’t had to take their shoes or jackets off in Amarillo airport security lines since early summer, said Sides, who leads TSA efforts at airports in Amarillo, Lubbock, Midland, Abilene and San Angelo.

That change followed the nationwide adoption of reduced screening for children ages 12 and younger last fall, Sides said.

“It’s called risk-based management: We focus our energy on the one bad guy, rather than 99 of your friends and neighbors,” he said.

Sides, who is based in Lubbock, was in Amarillo on Tuesday to mark the 10th anniversary of federalization of security at Rick Husband. The celebration included the awarding of service pins to 10-year TSA employees here, a majority of the local force, which Sides estimated at 65 officers and a few managers.

Eligible passengers using a pre-check program available at larger airports — in Dallas and Houston, for example — volunteer information that can help speed their travel through security checkpoints, according to TSA.

The information they provide is embedded into the barcode of their boarding passes, TSA information said.

TSA officers at a checkpoint read the barcodes and refer pre-check passengers to a specific lane where they undergo expedited screening, “which could include being able to leave their shoes, light outerwear and belt on, allowing them to keep their laptop in its case and their ... compliant liquids/gels bag in a carry-on,” a TSA news release said.

The agency has partnered with participating U.S. air carriers and Customs and Border Protection for the program, which, by October, had been used by more than 3 million passengers, according to TSA.

But, like other small airports, Amarillo’s facility can’t accommodate the additional security lanes required for the faster screening, Sides said.

“We’ll always have the single checkpoint, and we’ll always have the single lane,” he said.

But pilot programs are under way to assess risk factors of other segments of passengers. Those determined to be low risk ultimately will be screened less, even in Amarillo, just as seniors and children are now, Sides said.

“Who’s to say what the next segment could be? It could be air crew members, military in uniform,” he said.

Reducing the queue of passengers who require heavy scrutiny actually will make the flying public safer, said Dr. Sheldon Howard Jacobson, a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“There’s a limited amount of resources, and if we use them uniformly across all travelers, we’re effectively diminishing the ability to find the needle in the haystack, the people who really are a risk in the system,” said Jacobson, who has researched the design and operation of effective aviation security since 1996.

“Our analysis has demonstrated that, because the vast majority of people really don’t pose a risk, by voluntarily providing information, these people could be basically taken out of the pool of risky or unknown passengers,” he said. “The resources that are not being used to screen these people can now be used to target the group that we either know very little about or are trying to hide information or we view as being real risks in the system.”

Because boarding passes can contain the pre-check program information volunteered by passengers, the plan could be implemented beyond major airports, Jacobson said.

“The next step is to tie (precheck) to the passengers, not to the airports,” he said. “It’s not the airports that have been pre-approved. ... The resources are available, and the technology.”

Jacobson called the program the “next progressive step” necessary for the federal agency.